Moscardino Read Online Free

eyes, he got pin-wheels as when he shut them facing the sun to see lights and glows of many colours.
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    There were the stubs of column, also, on which the old people had set the broken tubs from Montelupo that the tinker had patched up with wire and lumps of plaster, so that they now held earth as well as they had once held the washing. The old tubs from Montelupo with two masks and mottoes:
    â€œLike to like.”
    â€œGod makes ’em, and then gives ’em mates they deserve.” Now they were full of rich earth, geraniums and daisies green in them so as to look like a shrub trunk with small flowers round it not passing the edge. Grumpy drew up the water, the abbé carried it to the old jars from Montelupo. They were painted now to conceal their age, the cracks, the snubbed noses of the masks, covered with a sort of red chalk that you use to paint tiles in a bedroom. Thus when the abbé had drowned the flowers that didn’t pass the tub’s edge there was a bloody wreath round the tubs.
    Grumpy wouldn’t come near them for fear of that spilled blood on the ground, and the abbé never looked down the well for fear of dizziness.

    That was their way of passing the time, as it was now impossible for them to stay indoors. My grandfather watched Grumpy’s eyes, and the abbé’s hands stuffed through the unfaced slits of his soutane.
    If Grumpy so much as looked at Cleofe, dinner was off. Grumpy barricaded himself in his room and the abbé had no hair left where his tonsure should have been, it was now twice the size of most priests’; and Cleofe could no longer keep my grandfather calm. Her gentleness only drove him wild and made him crazy with jealousy.
    â€œYour brother will kill you one day.” And Grumpy shut his eyes and saw my grandfather in uniform with his eyes shining scarlet.
    And “that woman’s” sweetish voice crept into his ears, trembling as if with compassion, almost as if she were weeping, there were tears almost in her voice full of urgence.
    Grumpy no longer had his mother to fondle him. Threats at his throat if he so much as cast an affectionate glance, he crept into the house like a sneak thief, felt like a burglar if caught, barricaded himself in his room to keep from being flayed alive; and “that woman” who came so often to the well, did she know it? Did she know, and was she afraid he would die soon?
    She was perhaps his guardian angel that had watched over his childhood. A great wave of feeling swept over her that she could express only with her eyes closed, weeping: Your brother will kill you one of these days.

    Grumpy shut his eyes: And you, Don Lorenzo, do you remember your mother, before she went off her head? Nobody would touch a hair of your head then.
    And Don Lorenzo sniggered, as he did when Cleofe looked at him.
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    Grumpy was drawing up water, and that woman stood with her thighs close to him as if wanting to help him.
    When the bucket was in reach she leant over the well-curb to take it, crushing her belly against the green stone so that her thighs seemed to hold up two antennae as the wooden braces hold up the countryside bridges.
    Her breast lay heavy almost falling out of her linen dress gathered in at the neck like the tunic of a Madonna.
    Grumpy looked at the freckles on her breasts; so near now he could see her heart-throbs. Her throat brushed his hand and he shut his eyes as if in terror, and if the odor of lavender, released from the fold of the linen blouse puffed out by the weight of her breasts, reached into his nostrils he closed his eyes terrified with his legs weak as if in a fit of malaria.
    So they remained hung over the well-curb in abandon, Grumpy’s head drawn like a weight toward the well-bottom among the shadowy spirits which took hold of the bushy hair of the reflected head and beat
it against the head of the woman reflected, so that the images were melted together, one over the other,